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Charmaine Yoest’s Cheerful War on Abortion

One day in the spring, I went with Charmaine Yoest, head of Americans United for Life, a pro-life advocacy group, to meet two of her five kids at a Barnes & Noble near her office in Washington. We sat down in the Starbucks corner of the bookstore, and James and Sarah, who are 8 and 11, told me about the March for Life on the National Mall. They go every year, scouting out heating vents to stand on when it’s cold and competing over who can hand out the most Life Counts posters. “We start up chants,” Sarah volunteered, looking up from her Frappuccino with whipped cream. “Like ‘Fight Planned Parenthood.’ ”

Yoest put her arm around her daughter and finessed the slogan a bit. “We’re fighting Planned Parenthood to protect women,” she said. “When those babies aren’t born, that is a loss for their mothers, and that’s part of why they need a chance to live.”

It’s the kind of deft reframing of the abortion debate that has put Yoest (pronounced “yoast”) at the center of anti-abortion politics and enabled her to help push through the greatest number of abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. In 2011, after Republicans made gains in statehouses across the country, 24 state legislatures passed 92 abortion restrictions — more than double the total for any previous year. The pace slowed in the first half of 2012, with 40 new provisions passed in 17 states. Around one-third of the bills, with names like the Abortion Patients’ Enhanced Safety Act and the Women’s Health Defense Act, were written by A.U.L. They made it impossible for clinics to operate in some states, made the procedure harder to access in the first trimester and barred it outright later in pregnancy.

Though she has helped usher in hard-hitting changes in women’s health care, Yoest is especially good at sounding reasonable rather than extreme. She never deviates from her talking points, never raises her voice and never forgets to smile. While the organization that she runs is relatively small — its budget is about half that of the National Right to Life Committee — her personal appeal gives her outsize visibility. She’s the one making the case against abortion on the PBS “NewsHour.”

“The pro-life side realized, to their credit, that they had to rethink their image,” says Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Choice. “A lot of people in the middle were looking at them and saying, ‘You care about the unborn babies, but what about the mothers?’ So they started talking about protecting women, too, and Charmaine Yoest is the perfect face for that.”

Yoest got into politics early. When she was a teenager, she and her brother went door to door for a Republican candidate for Congress. Yoest’s mother and father are academics and Protestant evangelicals, and though they opposed abortion as a matter of course, that position didn’t define their politics. It didn’t define Yoest’s initially either: after college, she turned down a job with A.U.L. to work in the Reagan White House. There she met Gary Bauer, then chairman of Reagan’s Special Working Group on the Family, and in the late 1980s moved with him to the conservative Family Research Council, where she worked on promoting adoption and child care. In the early ’90s, Yoest married and left the council to have a family and get a Ph.D. in politics from the University of Virginia. She directed a project on work-life balance in academia, writing a dissertation called “Empowering Shakespeare’s Sister,” about the effects of paid parental leave on achievement for women.

The work-life balance hit home when she got an offer to be senior adviser for Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign in 2008. Yoest didn’t think she could go on the road as the job demanded, but her husband, Jack, who now teaches business at Catholic University, said that she should. Eventually they took the children out of school and piled into the family Suburban to spend weeks campaigning. After Huckabee pulled out of the election, Yoest was offered the job running A.U.L. This time, she threw herself into the anti-abortion cause.

The Yoests live in a D.C. suburb (she asked me not to name it) where the politics skew liberal but where Yoest says she feels at home. In 2009, when she had six months of chemotherapy to treat breast cancer, the mother of one daughter’s classmate organized a lunch-making brigade for all the Yoest kids, and every school day, one family or another dropped off the lunches in a cooler by the front door. “We called it the magic fridge,” Yoest said. When she’s at one of her children’s baseball games or crew regattas and a parent asks about her work, she tries to deflect the question. “I tend to say, ‘Oh, gosh, it’s Saturday, it’s sunny — have you seen any good movies?’ ” she told me. After that, she’ll say she works at a nonprofit. If pressed further, she sticks to her TV talking points. “I explain that we work on moving forward legislation about informed consent, and making sure women get the best standard of medical care — the things most people agree on. So there’s a parallel between our public strategy at A.U.L. and my private discussions.”

None of this, however, means that Charmaine Yoest is a moderate. For all her emphasis on women’s health, her end goal isn’t to make abortion safer. She wants to make the procedure illegal. She leaves no room for exceptions in the case of rape or incest or to preserve the health of the mother. She believes that embryos have legal rights and opposes birth control, like the IUD, that she thinks “has life-ending properties.”

Nor does Yoest advocate for reducing abortion by increasing access to birth control. When I asked what she thought about a study, published in October, which found a 60 to 80 percent drop in the abortion rate, compared with the national average, among women in St. Louis who received free birth control for three years, she said, “I don’t want to frustrate you, but I’m not going to go there.” She referred me to a critique of the study’s methodology in National Review. “It’s really a red herring that the abortion lobby likes to bring up by conflating abortion and birth control,” she said when pressed on PBS last year. “Because that would be, frankly, carrying water for the other side to allow them to redefine the issue in that way.”

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Elinor Carucci/Redux for The New York Times

Yoest doesn’t like to speak this bluntly — she was taken aback when I reminded her of the PBS quote. And she is careful to avoid missteps like the Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s comment in August that victims of “legitimate rape” don’t need access to abortion because they don’t become pregnant, or the claim at the end of October by Richard Mourdock, the Indiana Senate candidate, that when women do become pregnant from rape, “that is something God intended to happen.”

In the aftermath of Akin’s statement, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a 1972 essay by an obstetrician named Fred Mecklenburg, who cited a Nazi experiment in which women were told they were on their way to die in the gas chambers — and then were allowed to live, so that doctors could check whether they would still ovulate. Since few did, Mecklenburg claimed that women exposed to the emotional trauma of rape wouldn’t be able to become pregnant, either. (He also argued that rapists are infertile because they masturbate a lot.) The essay was published in a book financed by A.U.L. When I asked Yoest about this, she tried to bat away the connection, stressing that he was also a member of the American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians. “I just think you’re going back decades and decades,” she told me. When I asked what she thought about Akin’s reliance on bogus science, she said, “I’m not going to answer that.” Though Yoest agrees with Akin that abortion should be illegal in every circumstance, she said that talking about “the minutiae of the rape exception is not where it’s at at all.” It was as if Akin had undone all her careful framing. “It’s a distraction. It’s not relevant to the discussion.”

It’s hard to remember now, but for a brief moment around the time the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973, it looked as if legalizing abortion would not be hugely divisive. Between 1967 and 1970, 17 states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, lifted some restrictions on the procedure. The vote for Roe on the Supreme Court was 7 to 2, with conservative Republican appointees signing on. In a Gallup poll, 68 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats said in 1972 — the year after A.U.L. was founded — that the decision to abort should be solely between a woman and her doctor.

As those polls indicate, opposing abortion wasn’t always a moral imperative for the Republican Party. But it would soon become a tactical one. In 1979, two G.O.P. strategists, Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, seized on the issue as a tool for wooing Catholic and evangelical voters to the party. As Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel write in their book, “Before Roe v. Wade,” the pair approached the Rev. Jerry Falwell with the idea of organizing a socially conservative “Moral Majority,” with abortion as the central issue. Vigurie and Weyrich also set up an early anti-abortion political action committee for the 1980 election, which they used to help get like-minded candidates elected. And in fact, around that time Republicans in Congress started voting for abortion restrictions at a higher rate than Democrats — even though Republican voters would remain more likely to be pro-choice than Democrats until the late 1980s.

As the issue heated up, anti-abortion groups, including A.U.L., began to put more muscle into fighting for restrictions on the state level — chipping away at Roe one legislature at a time rather than focusing all their efforts in D.C. Early state bills mandated waiting periods and parental consent for minors, restrictions that still poll well today. By this time, however, the movement had attracted its share of zealots, and this faction derided these laws as half-measures and took more direct action — chaining themselves to clinics and, in the most extreme cases, bombing them.

In 1989, the anti-abortion movement won a signature battle when the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, upheld a Missouri law that stated that “the life of each human being begins at conception.” The court refused to overturn Roe but allowed the state to ban the use of its funds for abortions and related counseling. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion concurring with the decision but angrily accusing the court of sending a mixed message and endorsing “a chaos that is evident to anyone who can read and count.”

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Roe seemed to be hanging by a thread — or at least one Supreme Court vote — and abortion rights advocates played to moderate voters with the slogan “Who Decides — You or Them?” as William Saletan recounts in his book “Bearing Right.” In the 1992 election, Democratic candidates, including Bill Clinton, tacked to the middle, successfully running on the message “safe, legal and rare” while also backing parental-consent laws. That year the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe.

For a time, abortion opponents were disconsolate. By the mid-’90s, however, they struck upon a new line of legislative attack — seeking to ban a particular kind of extremely unusual late-term procedure. “Everything changed when our side started talking about partial-birth abortion,” Yoest told me. By coining that term and describing the dismemberment of the fetus in gruesome detail, activists successfully lobbied statehouses to ban it.

Though late-term abortions of all kinds are rare — about 90 percent of abortions in the United States take place in the first trimester — the discussion about the procedure made people uncomfortable and took over the debate. Over the next few years, the number of Americans who defined themselves as “pro-life” began to rise (it recently hit 50 percent), followed by an increase in the number who said they believed abortion was morally wrong. Anti-abortion advocates had apparently succeeded by conflating one kind of late-term abortion with all abortion.

Congress passed a late-term-abortion ban in 2003. The Supreme Court upheld the law 5 to 4 four years later. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that abortion could hurt the women who sought the procedure. Citing a series of affidavits, collected by a small Texas anti-abortion group, from women who claimed to be harmed by abortion, he wrote that “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” When Yoest took the helm of A.U.L. in 2008, she embraced this idea and has tried to make the case that being anti-abortion is being pro-woman.

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Yoest, center, with her family before one of her sons’ football games.Credit
Elinor Carucci/Redux, for The New York Times

Sitting at Starbucks with Yoest and her children as they drank their Frappuccinos, James and Sarah chatted comfortably about their school and their sports teams, allowing that they sometimes disagree with kids they know about politics, but chalking that up to the other kids’ ignorance. “A lot of people like Obama because they aren’t aware of how he supports abortion,” Sarah said. “Their parents don’t tell them. We’re different because ours do.” When Yoest and her husband feel friction between the family ethic and the values of their neighbors, they use it to bolster their kids’ sense of independence. In fourth grade, their middle daughter, Helena, was ordered to take off an anti-abortion T-shirt she’d worn to school. “I came straight in to have a little chat with the principal about the First Amendment,” Yoest said. “I think it helped Helena learn to stick to her guns.”

Yoest takes pleasure in the idea of being the underdog fighting the liberal orthodoxy. She repeatedly brought up Planned Parenthood and its president, Cecile Richards, comparing A.U.L.’s $4 million budget with Planned Parenthood’s $1 billion. “If the pro-choice side got traction, it’s because Cecile Richards has the bigger microphone,” she would say. Or, “We have to be countercultural — after all, Cecile Richards has the self-appointed duty of defining what’s pro-woman these days.”

In the summer of 2011, Yoest’s staff hand-delivered a 181-page A.U.L. report, called “The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood,” to some 250 legislators on Capitol Hill. To her delight, a Florida Republican, Cliff Stearns, a longtime abortion foe, followed up by beginning his own investigation of the women’s-health provider. Last winter, the Komen foundation for breast-cancer research cited that inquiry in announcing that it would no longer finance Planned Parenthood. “I am THRILLED,” Yoest wrote on Twitter, which she uses to cultivate relationships with supporters and reporters and cheer on her kids’ sports teams. “It was our carpe diem moment,” she told me.

But the moment slipped away as the breast-cancer charity was hit with an onslaught of fury from supporters of Planned Parenthood. No one at Komen was talking to Yoest. “There’s so much information we could have thrown into the debate,” she lamented. “It was very frustrating to have the knowledge but not be the one turning the crank to get it out there.”

Yoest says that her ideas about abortion are driven by science. “I can speak as someone who spent 10 years getting a Ph.D. at one of the top universities in the country, working with the data to get it to pass muster,” she told me the first time we met, over breakfast at a restaurant near her office.

What data? I asked. Yoest would only refer back to the pro-life obstetricians she trusts and later declared that the scientific establishment “is under the control of the abortion lobby.”

The idea that abortion increases the risk of cancer is the basis of a Texas law that A.U.L. helped draft, requiring doctors to tell patients about the link. Alaska, Kansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma have similar mandates. Legal scholars like Robert Post, dean of Yale Law School, have argued for years that forcing doctors to give their patients inaccurate information violates their First Amendment rights, but the Texas measure hasn’t yet been challenged in court.

Yoest was also involved in pushing for Arizona’s Mother’s Health and Safety Act, which passed in April and bans abortions after 20 weeks because the risks of medical complications rise around this point in pregnancy — in other words, supposedly to protect women’s health. Similar bans in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma were premised on the idea that a fetus by this point can feel pain (another claim that scientists dispute). In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit temporarily blocked Arizona’s 20-week ban from going into effect, pending a hearing in San Francisco on Nov. 5. This is one of more than a dozen court challenges of abortion restrictions around the country. From Yoest’s perspective, the Arizona litigation is win-win: if the Ninth Circuit strikes the law down, the case could be bound for the Supreme Court, where Yoest hopes that Justice Kennedy would take kindly to the idea that the law was written to help women.

“I’m thinking about flying to San Francisco to hear the argument in the case because that’s such a signature piece of legislation for us,” she said about the Arizona law. “Expanding its reach to other states will definitely be one of our priorities.”

A.U.L.’s success could grow significantly if Mitt Romney is elected. Picking Paul Ryan as his running mate “was the very first indicator of what kind of administration Romney is looking to put together, and he chose someone very committed to our issue,” she told me. A President Romney could not only pick a Supreme Court justice who would be the fifth vote to overturn Roe; he could also have a quick and forceful impact, Yoest pointed out, by choosing staunch abortion opponents for positions like attorney general, surgeon general and secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. “As Reagan used to say, personnel is policy,” she told me. No matter who wins on Election Day, Yoest will continue to follow her step-by-step plan to make abortion illegal. “As we’re moving forward at the state level, we end up hollowing out Roe even without the Supreme Court. That’s really where our strategy is so solid.”

Emily Bazelon is a contributing writer for the magazine and a senior editor at Slate. Her book ‘‘Sticks and Stones’’ will be published in February.